Bitter Business (26 page)

“Anybody with either a screwdriver or half a brain could get into this thing,” he commented as he slid the key into the lock.

“Any sign that somebody tried to break into it?”

“None. They lifted a bunch of prints, but they haven’t ID’d them yet.”

“In that case, I guess the question is who has the key?”

“According to Joe, there were only four keys and the only people who had them were Cavanaughs—Jack, Philip, Eugene, and the deceased.”

“You mean Dagny.”

“Yes. Dagny had a key.”

“Are any of them missing?”

“Joe’s going to check on it.”

Elliott turned the handle of the door and held it wide so that I could see inside. He switched on the light. The whole thing was about the size of a large coat closet, with dozens of brightly colored plastic containers, each clearly labeled poison in three languages.

“The yellow ones are chromic acid, the blue ones are the sodium cyanide.” He pried the lid off one of the blue ones. It was filled with white granules that might have been sugar.

“Do I have to stand back or anything?” I asked. “What if you breathe it in?”

“You can’t. Not unless you mixed it with an acid and turned it into a gas. Like this it’s not dangerous. The security guard says the only reason he thinks they keep it locked up is so that somebody doesn’t accidentally mistake it for sugar.”

“So how much of this would it take to kill someone?”

“According to what Dr. Gordon told Joe, a quarter of a teaspoon, maybe less.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Have you seen enough?”

I nodded. Elliott put the top back on the container, switched off the light, closed the door, and relocked it. We stood facing each other across the narrow and dimly lit hall, but there was no trace of the previous night’s electricity. Elliott’s features were stern—all business. Both of us were preoccupied with the riddle of the poison.

“I assume they’re going to test all of the stuff they’re taking from the medicine chest,” I said. “Perhaps the poison was in some sort of medicine, eyedrops or a nasal spray. Might that not account for the fact that the stomach contents of both women had turned up negative for the poison? How long will it be before they have the results?”

“My guess is a week or ten days. I’m sure Joe’ll do what he can to speed things up. You should see if Jack Cavanaugh has any juice he can use to pressure them into moving on this. But between you and me there’s only so much we’re going to be able to do. The way things are right now we’re in a catch-22 situation. So far the medical examiner’s office has pended both deaths and I know for a fact that won’t change until they’ve categorically ruled out the chance that both women were poisoned by accident. Unfortunately, as far as the Chicago Police Department is concerned, a pended case is not a murder. And if it’s not a murder, then it doesn’t go onto the homicide squad’s list of open files and Joe Blades doesn’t get taken out of the rotation to investigate it. It’s up to the primary detective to investigate pending cases on his own. Believe me, Joe’s a good cop and he’s going to work it as hard as he can. But tonight he’s going to report for his shift and the phone’s going to ring and it’s going to be a fresh murder. And after that it’s going to be a steady stream of shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and autoerotic strangulations.”

“So what are you trying to tell me?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

“I’m trying to tell you that the way things stand right now, unless we do something about it, this case is going to slip right through the cracks.”

Declining a halfhearted invitation for lunch, I had Elliott drop me a few blocks from my office. Under the circumstances, I felt like I needed the walk to clear my head.

It had been sunny when I’d gone for a run that morning, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. By now it had clouded over, and in the permanent shade of the office buildings on LaSalle Street there was a raw chill in the air. I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my raincoat and pulled out the two cigars I’d bought for Daniel Babbage. I held them on my palm and looked at them for a minute. I closed my fingers tightly around them until I slam-dunked them into a filthy trash barrel on the comer of Monroe Street.

Callahan Ross was in its usual state of Sunday somnolence. On Sundays even the biggest grinds could be counted upon to stay at home, since no partner worth impressing ever crossed the threshold unless in the throes of a particularly heated transaction. Which, of course, is what made Sunday my favorite day of the week for getting work done. I loved the feeling of having the entire firm to myself. So I was surprised in my journey down the dark and silent corridor to see the light on in Daniel Babbage’s office.

I don’t know who I expected to see, but when I leaned into the open doorway to take a peek, it was Daniel’s secretary, Madeline, who spun around with a small shriek of surprise. She was dressed in a pantsuit of lavender polyester and her hair was varnished into the same tortured bouffant that had greeted Daniel every day at the office. The only difference was that today her stem features were blotched and puffy from crying.

She had, she explained, been with him when he died. There had also been a sister who’d driven in from Naperville at his bedside as well. I usually try to steer clear of maudlin sentimentality, but I confess that I was glad to learn that Daniel, a self-proclaimed solitary in life, hadn’t spent his last hours alone.

“How many years did you work for him?” I asked as she dabbed the comers of her eyes with a lacy handkerchief that she fished from somewhere within her ample bosom.

“It’d be thirty years this June. I came to work for the firm in the typing pool straight out of high school. In those days the firm used to look for girls from smaller towns downstate—they thought we weren’t as coarse as the city girls, and would make better wife material. Back then, it was quite usual for a young lawyer to marry one of the secretaries. It was almost expected.

“So I came up here from Savoy—that’s my hometown—and took a job with my friend Lucille. We lived in a ladies-only residence on Belmont, with no gentlemen visitors allowed beyond the front parlor. You girls have no idea how much the world has changed in the past thirty years.

“When I first came to work at the firm there was a secretary named Bernice Simmons who was a fully trained lawyer. She’d fought tooth and nail to get into law school at Northwestern—the only woman in her class. But after she graduated, the only job they’d give her was typing for Mr. Ross. She retired five or six years ago, just before you came. My friend Lucille ended up marrying a young man in the tax department, but it turns out secretaries were a hard habit for him to break and they ended up divorced. I worked for two years in the typing pool before I was assigned to Mr. Babbage. I’ve worked for him ever since. God knows what I’ll do now.”

“You didn’t have to come in today,” I told her. “I can’t imagine that there’s anything that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m not doing anything that couldn’t wait until a year from tomorrow,” Daniel’s loyal secretary replied. “But when I got through with church this morning, I didn’t want to go back to my empty apartment. Somehow it seemed better to come in here and get a start going through his papers. There’s quite a bit of old material that will need to be put with the newer sections of the files. It’ll take weeks to get it all sorted out. Besides, this was his favorite place,” she said, indicating the office. “It just seemed right to be here today.”

“Madeline, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You probably knew Daniel better than anybody and I know he discussed his cases with you. Did he ever talk to you about why he decided to give certain files to certain lawyers after he learned he was ill?”

“You mean, did he ever tell me why he chose you for Superior Plating?”

“Yes. Why me?”

“There were a number of reasons,” she replied. “For one thing, he thought you and Dagny Cavanaugh would hit it off. Mr. Babbage believed that more than anything else when you were dealing with a family business, it was important that the lawyer and the decision-making family member have a good relationship. Over the years he and Jack Cavanaugh became very close. Mr. Babbage thought over time the same kind of relationship would grow between you and Dagny.”

“But when you say decision-making family member, wouldn’t that mean he’d want someone who’d get along with Philip Cavanaugh? After all, it’s Philip who’s going to succeed Jack as head of the company.”

“Mr. Babbage told me that would never happen. He was convinced that Dagny would find some way to take over the company—or at least the main plating business. He assumed that after Jack died, Philip would spin off the specialty chemicals business—he never has had any real interest in plating, and according to Mr. Babbage, he has a real flair for the chemical business. He said you were the perfect person to structure that kind of transaction.”

“He was probably right,” I replied grimly. “Unfortunately, things haven’t turned out like anyone expected. Dagny’s dead and my relationship with the rest of the Cavanaughs feels suspiciously like a group-therapy session from hell. With Dagny out of the picture I honestly don’t see what I bring to the party that’s going to be of any use to the Cavanaughs.”

“I know that Mr. Babbage wouldn’t have agreed.”

“What makes you say that?”

“He said there was something else that you had that the other lawyers he was considering for the Superior Plating file didn’t have.”

“What’s that?”

“Forgiveness.”

22

All through the afternoon, as I worked at my desk, what Elliott had said about the police investigation gnawed at a part of me. I have been a lawyer long enough to have seen demonstrated with metaphysical certainty the fact that there is no force in the universe as powerful as the inertia of bureaucracy. I was chilled by the prospect of Joe Blades squeezing his search for the truth about what had happened to the two women into the odd moment between drug murders and domestic homicides.

I believed it when Elliott told me that Blades was a good cop. But even a good cop can’t unravel one crime while he’s interviewing witnesses at the scene of another. Every time Blades took another call, it was going to take time away from the Cavanaugh case. And time wouldn’t be the only thing that would be lost. Physical evidence would disappear, memories would erode, and witnesses— if any had ever existed—would quietly fade away. It wouldn’t be too long before whatever urgency Blades might feel would be invariably diminished by the red heat of fresh murders.

Of course that’s why I’d urged Jack Cavanaugh to hire a private investigator in the first place. But as tenacious and well connected as Elliott Abelman might be, he was still working from the outside. There were some things you could only manage if you were a cop, people who you could get to talk only if you wore a badge.

The thing that rankled most—the thing that had rankled from the very beginnings—was the leisurely pace at which the toxicology lab seemed to operate. They had stumbled upon the cyanide by accident. What if they hadn’t? We’d still be waiting the two or three weeks for the toxicology results from Cecilia Dobson—which, when they eventually came back negative, would leave us exactly where we’d started.

Suddenly the thought of all the evidence I’d seen the crime-lab technicians take out of the bathroom at Dagny’s office consumed me. Which of the little jars and vials in the bathroom medicine chest had contained the poison, if any? Once that was known, at least there would be a place to start. But how long was that going to take? A week? A month?

Somewhere in this town there was someone with the juice to get what needed to be done done in a day instead of a week. The question was who and how to get to them. I thought about calling Elkin Caufield, my defense-attorney friend, but decided that whatever influence he’d managed to salt away had to be cashed in for his clients.

Swallowing my pride, I reached for the phone to call Skip Tillman, the firm’s managing partner. Skip played golf with the governor and tennis with several members of Congress. In addition, Callahan Ross had always coughed up generous contributions to both political parties in the pragmatic belief that it always pays to cover yourself both ways.

I dialed Skip’s number but hung up before it rang. However juvenile and perverse it might be, I hated the idea of crawling to the firm’s managing partner for a favor. I could just hear his well-bred, deprecating laugh as he explained to his lunchtime cronies what he’d managed to accomplish with a couple of phone calls. Besides, I suddenly thought of someone who was much better connected than Skip, someone who would be thrilled to have me owe her a favor....

Which is why, when I picked up the receiver, it was my mother’s number that I dialed.

Stephen called me from his office and asked what I was planning on doing for dinner. I looked at my watch; it was almost seven. I’d spent more than an hour on the phone with my mother—an all-time record, especially considering that we’d managed to remain on friendly terms throughout the conversation.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” I replied honestly. “Are you hungry?”

I thought about it for a second. “I’m starved.”

“How about Chinese food? We could stop in Chinatown on our way back to Hyde Park.”